The other day was Crazy Glasses day, and my teaching team (we’re missing one other in this photo) joined in.
Peace (through a lens),
Kevin
Three Poems In Progress (Writing In The Classroom)
During free-writing in class yesterday, I worked on some quick poems as they were writing all sorts of things, from comics to stories to letters to their own poems.
Four/Four
A set of drums
Fast pedal clock click
His hands hitting cymbals
An intricate rhythm stick
In near perfect balance
An intricate rhythm stick
In four-four time
The drummer never quits
Each note becomes another
Drive it home, forward
His hands hitting cymbals
The beat of feet
The guitar is gone
The bass drops out
The singer now sits
The drummer never quits
a variation on a 4×4 poem via Open Write
Voices spill out
beneath the door,
sound as shafts of light —
in escape,
shadows wait for more,
for us to linger
a little longer, our ears
pressed against the wood —
if only we could
drop beneath the eaves,
maybe then we’d believe
Dry mouth soil
savors these rains,
nearly forgotten by brittle Earth —
we were warned, remember,
about the flames,
the first spark ignites the dark
as the monsters came —
subsumed by an act of madness,
the kind only nature brings
Yet here we were, singing
the praise songs again,
the clouds dropping gifts up us
the rain
the rain
the rain
Peace (in verse),
Kevin
Book Covers: Student Stories
I always try to have some extension activities ready and available for students who finish longer assignments early, or to give more time to those who are working hard at the original assignment. My sixth graders are working to complete an adventure story (narrative story writing), and one of the extension activities is to design a book cover for their story, which then gets placed on a Virtual Book Shelf. For this collage (which is not the shelf), I took off their names as a way to share out their creative work. These are all done in Google Slides, with a template I give them.
Peace (between the pages),
Kevin
Write Out: National Park Explorations
My students are completing the final stages of work on a research project, where they chose a National Park as a topic and then gathered information and built a presentation for sharing. These are the final stages of our work for Write Out 2024. The college here is part of a Padlet site, so that all students across the classes could get a glimpse of what others have been doing.
Peace (in the park),
Kevin
Write Out: Poet-Trees And Haiku Leaves
We were lucky to have a National Park Ranger (Wes) spend the day in our school this week, talking about National Parks for Write Out and then leading students on two different outside activities — mapping the trees on the school property and then creating “poet-trees” with haiku poems.
Peace (and poems),
Kevin
Open Write Day One: Tiny Poem
Today is the first of five poem prompts for September at Ethical ELA’s Open Write, and the theme is about the start of the school year, in the form of a tiny poem. I chose a Naani form of poem — four lines, less than 25 syllables.
For the first time in more than 15 years, I had my classroom moved, and I went from the only air conditioned classroom in my building — but it was completely isolated from everyone else — to the hottest classroom in the building – sun all day long, a corner room.
Luckily, it has not been too bad, but with windows open all day, the sounds of all of our school’s students on the playground — yelling, screeching, laughing — is in the air at all times. My own student writers are much better at blocking out the sounds than I am, but I am getting used to it.
Peace (of mind),
Kevin
Poem: Skating In The Remembering
Twelve Sparkling Lights flickr photo by Sushanta – paper, scissors, void shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license
This morning’s prompt at OpenWrite was about “reflection and projection” but I found myself caught up in the classroom move I am making (for the first time, in many years), and the packing up of everything now.
Boxes, packed
with papers,
books, pens,
notes, plansIn August,
I hope to better
understand where
things have goneFor now, I’m on
the surface of
the mirror,
skating in the
rememberingNot yet
imagining the space
taking shape
only in my mind,
for some future time
Peace (in reflections),
Kevin
Blackout Poems Collection
This is a visual look at the Blackout Poems my students were creating yesterday before we went to take in the Solar Eclipse.
Peace (and poems),
Kevin
Lightning Thief Musical: Songs From The Show
Last night, I had the pleasure to interview Rob Rokiki for the National Writing Project’s Write Time show. Rob wrote the music and lyrics to The Lightning Thief musical, and he shared insights into his writing process and creative thinking when balancing music, writing and story. When the NWP interview gets released, I’ll share it here but I also found the album of music he wrote from that show that had been released as an album.
I teach The Lightning Thief as a novel with my sixth graders, so this was a wonderful experience to talk to Rob. They were excited to hear about my opportunity to connect with the writer of the songs of the musical.
Peace (and song),
Kevin
A Closer Look At 20 Years Of Invented Words
I shared out the other day that my sixth graders were donating new words to an ongoing Crazy Collaborative Dictionary Project. The project – which began in 2005 and continues to this day — contains more than 1250 words, with new ones added each year by students. It is part of a unit on the Origin of Words.
The 20-year mark must mean something, right?
So I started to think about how to share some of the work out in a more visual way. Thus, a few charts.
First, the new home for the dictionary is here at a Google Site. It’s had many homes over the years, starting on paper, and then in Wikis, then blogs, and now Sites. We also have a folder of audio files, of students reading their words and definitions.
I was curious about which letters had the most words so I did the counting. “S” by a longshot! “V”? Not so much. But every letter has at least some words.
Then, I got curious about the longest word ever submitted, and the shortest. Some years, some students try really hard to make the longest word imaginable, and then have fun trying to pronounce it for our audio files.
Overall, the project has provided a curiosity for my students and families, but also, a showcase for how language changes, and how words are created to fill a niche in strange ways (and how much this is happening more so in the age of social media, where the viral nature of things impact our language).
Peace (and Words),
Kevin